Enterprise desktop image management is one of the most challenging tasks for Information Technology (IT) departments of large organizations today. A typical IT department needs to manage, protect, and distribute software updates and modifications, upgrade operating systems and applications, as well as be able to back up and restore the user's data, applications and settings on demand. One significant issue for IT departments involves the complexity of managing a large number of different desktop instances that exist on the computers of various enterprise users. The sheer number of computers to manage; the proliferation of operating system (OS) images and applications; and the complex set of operations, such as deployment, provisioning, patching, upgrading, installing and managing applications, performing backup and restore operations, compliance testing, troubleshooting and re-imaging; all make IT responsibilities a very challenging task. To compound these difficulties, today's enterprises are often dispersed over multiple geographic locations and the use of Local Area Networks (LANs) connected over one or more Wide Area Networks (WANs) with variable bandwidths and latencies is a serious barrier to providing efficient desktop management without sacrificing end user experience.
One particular difficulty for IT departments arises in situations where a new application or other software update needs to be distributed to a large number of user endpoint devices (e.g., employee laptops). Even if the tools for transmitting such an update from some central location are available, the sheer number of devices and the amount of data to be transferred makes this a challenging task. The administrator and the management console for distributing such updates is often located remotely from the endpoint devices that need to receive the update, meaning that the data transfer needs to happen over a wide area network (WAN) connection. However, transferring large amounts of data over a WAN connection is generally time-consuming and inefficient, and may impact the user experience of a user that is using the device during such updates. All of these inefficiencies are exacerbated when many endpoint devices are involved.
One way to address some of these inefficiencies is to select one endpoint device (sometimes referred to as a “branch reflector”) that is located on the same local area network (LAN) as other endpoint devices and designate the selected endpoint device to receive the initial software update (e.g., a new application, operating system update, etc.). After the designated device has completed the download, all other endpoint devices on the same LAN may retrieve the update from the designated device using a substantially more efficient LAN connection. This can improve performance to some extent, however a number of inefficiencies remain with this approach. For example, selecting such a single node for receiving all updates may require a certain amount of manual maintenance/management and may also create a single point of failure for the bandwidth optimization. Additionally, the user experience on the designated node may be impacted when compared to the remaining devices on the LAN. A more efficient technique for distributing software updates and for downloading content in networked environments is needed.